


This Is My Bargain

by the_rck



Series: If You Don't Look Back, the Future Never Happens [2]
Category: DCU, Smallville
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Artificial Intelligence, Comic Book Science, Desperate Measures, Doomed Timelines, Dubious Ethics, Fortress of Solitude, In-Laws, M/M, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-04 21:53:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13373805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_rck/pseuds/the_rck
Summary: “There is something else…” The AI sounded as if it were forcing out words made of razor blades. “It might work. It might not.”This time, Lex let his laughter out, bitterness and all. “Because I’ve never tried things that might not work.”





	This Is My Bargain

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Oliver Baez Bendorf's "Evergreen."
> 
> References to past suicidal intent and to things that might make Lex go there again.
> 
> Lex uses 'it' to refer to the Jor-El AI/interface with the Fortress of Solitude in his own thoughts. Lex has probably never asked how the AI identifies but also is probably using 'it'-- whether consciously or not-- to dehumanize the AI.
> 
> Thanks to Gonqueasel for beta reading.

Lex was nearly certain that the Jor-El AI didn't like him. He wasn't sure if that was generalized Kryptonian snobbery toward humans or if it disapproved of his relationship with Clark for other reasons. It certainly thought that Clark should abandon the Earth to its fate, and part of that was abandoning Lex.

Lex supposed that that was completely consistent with a man who would save one child-- his own-- out of what must have been millions. When the world ends, you leave it behind without a backward look. 

But the AI had to obey Clark, and Clark had ordered it to help and obey Lex. Clark had noticed the problem and said something devastatingly mild in rebuke. Lex would have sworn he saw Jor-El flinch.

Since Lex could no longer leave the Fortress of Solitude, he was giving his full attention to studying Kryptonian science. He didn't expect to find an answer to the problem of Darkseid, not given that he had to start from the basics, but not trying was a sure path toward slitting his wrists.

He worried more about his death destroying Clark than he did about dying. His body had recovered as much as it could from the torture he'd endured, but he and Clark both knew that Lex would be lucky to manage another decade.

At least they had some good pain killers for the days when his legs spasmed and a lot of options for adaptive devices on the days when he needed them or simply knew he had better things to spend his resources on than on maintaining the fiction that he hadn’t been hurt.

At least Clark had learned to ask before trying to take care of everything for Lex.

Lex had found a way to make himself an AI in the same way that Jor-El had. He hadn't told Clark because Lex couldn't imagine willingly entwining his mind with Jor-El’s and then staying that way forever.

He’d probably get there eventually. He just wanted to put off that defeat as long as possible.

“Whose idea was it to put the Fortress somewhere that doesn't see sunlight for months?” Lex knew the answer, and Jor-El knew that he knew, but they were two weeks into Clark's attempt at hibernation. None of them were sure it would work, but Clark hadn’t died yet, so it probably would.

Clark had vetoed the idea of leaving to chase the sun because people died when Darkseid got word that Superman had been seen. 

Lex hadn’t had the heart to point out that people were going to die anyway. He simply hoped that he and Jor-El could come up with a better plan than sitting there, waiting for Lex to die. At the very least, Lex wanted Clark to have a reason to go on. He didn’t think that Clark could go on if he simply left the Earth, but they’d been fighting Darkseid for more than a decade already, and once Lex died, Clark also couldn’t stay on Earth. 

Lex supposed that knowing that Clark would likely die not long after Lex did was the real reason Jor-El loathed Lex.

Lex hadn’t gotten all of his memories back, but Jor-El had been more than willing to list Lex’s failures as a leader of the resistance. As far as Lex could tell, most of those came down to having had too little information and to only having one Superman. People had tried, people with much smaller powers, powers they didn’t know how to use, hadn’t ever needed to know how to use. Lex had a long list of the dead who could have been heroes if someone had known to train them. None of them would have been as powerful as Clark, but Lex knew that small things could move the world, given the right application.

And even Superman could only be in one place at any given moment.

Once he’d concluded that changing the past was the only way to fix the present, Lex spent the next six days shit faced drunk because it was better than being alone with the knowledge that there was absolutely nothing anyone could do. Jor-El didn’t count as company, and Clark would sleep until the Arctic sun gave enough light to sustain his powers again.

Lex didn’t think he wanted to share this with Clark anyway. Except that, based on what Clark had said after he rescued Lex, Clark already knew. Clark hadn’t quite accepted it, but Clark knew.

The silence of the empty Fortress nearly drove Lex to another, much longer bender, but he didn’t want Clark to wake to find Lex a filthy, drunken mess, so he started talking to Jor-El again. He just made sure to address Jor-El as ‘Rimmer.’ He didn’t think Clark would find it funny, but Lex needed something. Clark needing to sleep a few months of every year meant a lot of time alone over the rest of Lex’s life.

He was never absolutely sure if Jor-El ignored the name because asking Lex for information was beneath him or because Jor-El recognized the reference.

But the odds were that, if Jor-El recognized the reference, he’d have started calling Lex ‘Lister’ just to return the insult. 

Lex decided that that level of ignorance of Earth culture wasn’t acceptable given that Jor-El was probably going to outlive any human left on the planet. Part of Lex’s mind recognized this as being far too much like drinking the days away for comfort, but it was, at least, less likely to destroy Lex’s body while Clark slept.

He wasn’t able to make Jor-El watch Red Dwarf because none of the episodes were among the things Clark had salvaged during the years when humanity’s records were being inexorably destroyed, but he found scattered episodes of other things, and Clark’s collection of books on paper took up several large rooms.

So Lex read books out loud to Jor-El when he could and made the AI consume and analyze TV and movies and music at other times.

When Lex woke early one morning and surprised Jor-El in the middle of one of the four surviving episodes of The Magic School Bus, he knew he was getting somewhere. It wasn’t a victory that achieved much beyond embarrassing the AI, but Lex didn’t have much scope for anything better.

Clark had privileged non-fiction over fiction and books of all types over works of art, including music. Lex remembered the beauty of symphonies now lost, but his memories weren’t clear enough to let him reconstruct any of them.

And it wouldn’t matter anyway. Anything Lex managed to reconstruct would simply vanish again when Darkseid’s forces finally found the Fortress of Solitude. Lex was pretty sure that Clark was wrong about it being able to withstand the likely onslaught. If nothing else worked, Darkseid’s people could simply cut the Fortress from the Earth’s skin and launch it into space. Most likely on a trajectory that would intersect with something large enough to obliterate it. Not the moon-- Earth would be pretty damned useless without the moon-- but there were other options.

Given Darkseid’s goals and resources, it was what Lex would have done.

Lex had stopped himself from trying to figure out how fast the air would go. Knowing one way or another wouldn’t help.

Clark had also privileged weapons technology over everything else. The weapons had all ended up useless, but they did, at least, give Lex something to tinker with when his voice gave out. He didn’t have a lot of formal education in science or engineering because, as Lionel Luthor’s son, his destiny had always been to manage the people who did such things. That required a different skill set.

He hadn’t done so well, trying to manage the resistance. Maybe everyone would have been better off if he hadn’t. Maybe he could have built something useful out of Tinker Toys and Legos. Or fairy dust and unicorn farts. Neither of those would have gotten people killed. They wouldn’t have saved anyone, but he suspected that would have been a lighter burden than knowing that he’d repeatedly sent people, both those he knew and those he didn’t, on missions that had never had a prayer of success.

Missions that he’d always known didn’t have a prayer of success. Having known and tried anyway was probably his greatest sin.

He was never going to tell Clark that, when he’d been captured, Lex had been trying to get himself killed. He’d wanted to go in a way that Clark wouldn’t guess was suicide. Maybe then Clark could save himself by leaving Earth before Darkseid found a way to kill him or-- worse-- to enslave him.

And Lex wouldn’t be doing what he was doing now. He wouldn’t be watching as his people and his planet slowly died.

Had it been easier for Jor-El to watch Krypton dying? Lex didn’t want to give the AI that sort of lever on him, so he never asked. He did, however, ask whether or not it might be possible to build something that would let Clark leave Earth with a few humans. 

“Or even just the right things to recreate humans. We could call it survival of the species,” Lex said, “but, really, it would give him a reason to keep going. We both know he’s going to need one.”

Jor-El didn’t answer for almost a minute. The AI seemed to be looking off into space.

Lex recognized the expression. This was one of those moments when the person who had become the AI was trying to make a decision based on something other than hard data. Lex hoped that meant that his idea was possible; he’d be okay with it being difficult as long as it was possible.

Under a yellow sun, Clark might live centuries. As things stood, he wouldn’t want to, but he could. If he thought he was saving something-- someone-- he’d keep going long enough to want to again.

“It is… possible,” Jor-El said at last. “I do not know if it is the wisest course.”

Lex stifled an urge toward bitter laughter. “None of your ‘better ideas’ ever worked either.” He met the AI’s eyes. “You said Darkseid’s invasion was ‘trivial.’” Lex would never forget that part because Jor-El had refused to give humanity the technology that had poisoned Krypton, because Jor-El had seen the risk of doing that as greater than the horror that was currently destroying them. 

“I’m a corpse walking. You know it. I know it. Even Clark knows it.” Lex wouldn’t have said it if Clark had been awake to hear, but somehow, getting it out in the open was a relief.

Jor-El shrugged. “An error on my part, yes.” The manifestation of the AI suddenly looked much older and much more exhausted.

Lex was a little startled to realize that the image Jor-El usually used probably wasn’t how the man had looked at the very end when he poured his mind into the machine he’d created. Jor-El had had enough vanity to want to look like he hadn’t fought his way through hell just to get that far. 

Jor-El hadn’t wanted his son to see him as a man diminished, as someone who had fought bitterly and lost everything anyway.

Lex wondered if any of the images of Krypton he and Clark had seen were actually from within Jor-El’s lifetime. He didn’t want to see that on the AI’s face, so he looked away. “I hadn’t realized we had that in common.” It was as close to an apology as he was ever going to go.

The AI was still an asshole.

“There is something else…” The AI sounded as if it were forcing out words made of razor blades. “It might work. It might not.”

This time, Lex let his laughter out, bitterness and all. “Because I’ve never tried things that might not work.”

“The theories involved are… complex,” the AI said with a hint of reproof. “We never managed to establish which of the possible mechanisms explained the effect or even-- Well.”

Lex hadn’t thought that Jor-El could look more defeated. Lex recognized the expression from seeing his own face in the mirror every morning.

“There is something I-- we-- can do that involves time. I just don’t know-- we never figured out-- if it would be moving something back in this timeline, this universe, a rewinding as it were, or if it would be shifting sideways to a universe identical but still, at that moment, at an earlier point in time.”

Lex was pretty sure that the yet to be revealed cost must be astronomical.

“We never managed more than about three days back, and we never sent anything living.”

Yeah, that was a pretty big stumbling block.

“I’ve been working on the calculations.” The AI hesitated. “We never went further with it on Krypton because the energy needed to go back far enough to make a difference--” It shook its head. “I’m pretty sure we can get Kal-El, as he is now, physically back at least as far as the day he first arrived on Earth. That will require all of this planet to be converted into energy.”

An even bigger stumbling block.

“If we’re rewinding,” Jor-El said, “then it doesn’t matter because there’s a chance to avoid ever needing to. If we’re crossing universes--”

“We don’t ever tell Clark that part.” Lex put as much steel into the words as he could manage. “We both know he couldn’t risk it.” Lex could. He had already accepted that everything he loved-- everything except Clark-- was dead. “Put the highest priority command I can give you on hiding that part from Clark.”

The lights dimmed for a split second.

“Done,” Jor-El said.

“Can we send anything with him?” Lex didn’t ask about people because he didn’t think that the few years he likely had left were worth destroying a second planet. He simply wouldn’t have either the time or the skills to be effective.

But maybe…

“It’s a matter of mass,” Jor-El replied. “I can show you the conversion, mass to energy to temporal displacement. I don’t think-- There’s a practical limit to what I can reach even if I use the energy from the Earth to get to other other mass to convert.”

“Information, then, as much as we can pack into something that the Fortress can read. Something he can sell for seed money. Even then, diamonds needed provenance.” Lex hesitated. Those were the essentials, really. He wasn’t sure that all of the other things he was considering were possible.

Or if they were wise even if they were possible.

Lex drew himself up to his full height. “An AI of me wouldn’t be me.” He made it a statement, but it was really a question. He’d never been sure how much the AI really thought of itself as a person.

Jor-El smiled with a bitterness that Lex also recognized from his own mirrored reflection. “I thought that. And perhaps I’m not. I can’t tell, and no one who knew me has survived to offer an opinion. I do know… One of the things I regret most is that Kal-El’s mother, Lara, never had the chance to join me. I am effectively immortal and effectively alone. Whether or not I am that Jor-El, I miss her. I miss our friends. Even our enemies.” Jor-El’s eyes met Lex’s. “I spent lives the same way you did, in the vain hope that something desperate and unlikely might still work.”

Lex shrugged. “It didn’t.” But there was still this. If nothing else, it was something to give Clark a reason to keep going. “As long as Clark thinks it’s me, it won’t really matter.”

“I won’t tell Kal-El that part, either.”

The lights flickered again.

Lex found some personal hope in the idea that the AI could give itself orders. It also scared him because it meant that Clark really wasn’t in charge. He’d known that, but he’d avoided looking at the power it gave the AI who might or might not be Jor-El.

Lex made himself focus on the matter at hand. “If you use the Earth, can you reach the sun?” The sun by itself would probably let them send the whole Fortress and its current contents back. Not that Lex would do that. Doing that wouldn’t make any sense when the damned thing could be built-- _In a better location._ \--in hours from what would be waiting for Clark in a Kansas cornfield.

“Possibly,” Jor-El replied. “It depends on how long we have to prepare. Sending him back, even him and a bit more, I could manage the energy by tomorrow. The data transfer and preparation would take longer. Reaching your sun--” The AI shrugged. “Somewhere between one and five years. Not longer but almost certainly not less time.”

Lex nodded. “If we have to take time anyway… There’s a different sort of practical limit, but if we can send someone back with him, physically, I think that would… anchor him. And…” Lex had to take a moment to look at his own grief over their failures. “Even Superman can’t be in more than one place at a time. Kids eight, nine, or even ten. That’s old enough to remember after they go back in time but young enough that he’ll have to take care of them. We can tell him it’s because kids have lower mass.”

Clark might guess at the lie because even he would realize that children grow and that, by five years out, an eight year old who was eating well might grow to a thirteen year old who was the same mass as an adult, but Clark would probably accept it because it meant saving children who were right in front of him, children that he’d have had time to love.

And reaching for the sun would give Lex a little longer in his own body and with Clark. He wanted to think that that wasn’t a factor in considering it, but he knew that it was.

Clark would need more money even if the kids were capable of bathing themselves and of heating soup in a microwave.

After these years of hell, no one that young had ever even seen a microwave.

“We’ll prepare for sending just Kal-El,” the AI said. “In case we run out of time.”

Lex nodded. He and Jor-El both knew how suddenly one could run out of time. “There’s a week left on Clark’s hibernation. We have that long before we have to start lying to him.”

“If I can reach the sun…” The AI almost seemed to be steeling itself. “If I can, there’s no reason for you not to go. Physically, I mean, in addition to as an AI. Even now, Kal-El isn’t quite as ruthless as… as will be needed.”

That came so near to admitting that Clark needed Lex’s company that Lex knew he couldn’t address it directly. He cleared his throat. “The world’s not going to end if we have adult Clark and kid Clark in close proximity, right?”

“Probably not.” Jor-El looked noticeably relieved at the change of subject. “It’s all still theoretical.”

And really not testable. “Well, if the world’s destroyed, we’ll all be too dead to care.”


End file.
